Journal of Banking & Finance Vol. 111 2020
Finance and development: Rethinking the role of financial transparency
Abstract
Over the last decade many developing countries strengthened their transparency standards with the objective of improving asset market allocations and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper develops a general equilibrium model and argues that in a financially underdeveloped economy - with uninsurable consumption risk and stochastic-investment - enforcing financial transparency might be counterproductive. The framework builds upon a standard property that illiquid asset markets cause under-investment in assets that pay in the long-run, because individually rational agents hoard cash to exploit sales of underpriced long-term assets. First, I show that in this environment private revelation of news about investment-returns could give a chance to sell low-quality assets and then characterize the conditions under which the lack of financial transparency reduces under-investment and improves macroeconomic development. An empirical analysis reveals that the theoretical predictions of the model is in line with cross-country data.
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.jbankfin.2019.105721
- Volume
- 111
- Pages
- 105721
- Language
- en
- Sources
- openalex crossref bibtex:phds-export.bib